Again, just hyperbole and exaggerations. You are on a crusade for making the Necromancer better. That’s ok. And I will support this as I am a big fan if Necro, too.
But since a few weeks when you became vocal here on the forums you try to convince everybody that the Necro is utterly broken. And you seem to think that you are the only person who cares and can solve the problem. You are posting essays and essays about how to “fix” skills and stuff. And when somebody disagrees, you play the “oh… you don’t understand what I’m saying… get out of here” card. That’s sad.
Let’s just for a moment think that all your pseudo intellectual stuff about parasitic design would be correct: what do you want to proof? If a skill does nothing and needs at least one other skill to do anything… what’s the point? Do you ever have less than 5 skills on your hot bar since you are out of the first few chapters? This whole part of your post doesn’t do anything to amplify your arguments you bring later. Because its unrelated. It’s just to show off how smart you are and how deep your knowledge of game design is. And by calling the skill “parasitic” you give it a negative flavour. “Oh… the skill is parasitic? This is bad. Because parasites are bad. So the skill must be bad, too!”
I am keeping an eye on this thread because it is getting little too heated. Please keep discussion on game topics constructive and non-combative, we all have the same goals here.
this is a personal attack, and downplays the actual argument being made by corellating it to an assumption.
here’s a homework assignment for you. produce numbers. any numbers you have to, that will make this skill balanced WITHOUT a mechnical change. do this and i will concede to you that i was expressing an opinion.
but you won’t be able to, because it isn’t possible. the mechanics of the ability prevent it from being so, but i’m sure in your eyes i’m just not finding the right imaginary numbers to make it work as is.
Note I didn’t say calculations, I said TESTING. Yes, you can create a build that focuses on nothing but permanent pet abilities, but I doubt you’d be able to survive well in Empowered Echoes with no defensive abilities or mana regenerators. Then the question becomes: “how well can you use your other skills to enhance the Abomination, and is it worth it compared to the Necro’s other skills?” So you either use your Abomination, load up its damage, and have to put with re-summoning it every other Echo, or you use something like Dread Shade and beef up Skeleton Archers’ + Mages’ Damage, or you use something like Bone Curse or Rip Blood and you compare the skills.
You rightfully noted that the Shades are clunky skills to use, and the Necro has few other skills that provide a decent boost to survivability (the Drain Life to create Wraiths was a neat interaction, but no multiplayer game server is going to survive multiple players with 150+ Wraiths each).
On one hand, no dev wants to create overpowered, brainless walking simulators that kill enemies a screen away, whether it’s flying electric orbs or multi-arrows or pets. On the other hand, the gear synergy for Necros is extremely lacking compared to other classes, especially as other classes can abuse the low-life aspect just as well as the Necro can.
Yes, testing for this class is going to be rough and complicated, because the devs are trying to answer the same question, “how do I get as many pets out as possible while not making the other skills useless?” Without the possibility of 150 Wraiths, what stands out from them being just reskinned Mages (assuming you’re doing the projectile route)? How do you keep the Abomination from effectively being a re-skinned Bone Golem, only obtainable 50 Levels later. Are the unique abilities worthwhile to use in battle compared to simply using the points for MOAR damage? I wish there were more open-ended dev discussions on “just what exactly were you hoping to get out of this skill,” and if they implemented or not implemented changes, what are the technical issues that prevent that?
you mean those things that necromancers don’t have? who do you think we are? mages?
the abomination only synergizes with 2 types of abilities, buff skills (which has like, 3 options that give anywhere from a ~20% increase all the way to a near 120% increase, but it kills the abomination in the process) and minion skills, if we knew the actual base numbers that the abomination scaled off of i could actually make a flow chart for you, but this information is secret and i’m not in the mood to divine it from hours of conditional testing. but the answer is probably that the golem isn’t worth sacrificing over a buff skill, and mages may or may not be depending on if the 150% additive damage the abomination gets is comparable to the actually increase in base stats over a buff skill, but skeletons and wraiths by sheer volume probably amount to a more significant boost than buff skills. either way, it doesn’t alter the mechanic underlining all these factors that prevent the abomination from being balanced by simple virtue that our other minions aren’t equal, but it treats them like they are.
as for how the abomination impacts the other minion skills, outside of the health degen removing skill node (which, as we have discussed, is a comically terrible nerf to your overall damage) it sorta doesn’t, it’s just a tremendous inconvenience every few minutes by virtue that you have to resummon everything.
Cough Diablo cough (although in fairness, that’s more of a spinning simulator nowadays)
funny you should mention this, because as it turns out, you actually sorta can’t if the skill is made balance-able, since in order for it to be considered “Balanced” it would need to gain dynamically as much power from each minion it eats as that minion represents, the only factor being specific to the abomination being it’s own base stats, which would naturally have to be nearly identical to the golem, as it is the only other minion spell that only allows you to have 1 by default (although i imagine it’s base stats would be slightly squishier in exchange for more damage, but either way they’d be proportional to the golem) the only benefit of this is the single minion synergy with buff skills like dread shade, in exchange for the loss in synergy with on-hit debuffs like poisons and armor shreds and such. so i suppose it could have a small niche in that regard, but if they made it gain any more or less power than the minions it eats, then it would either be worthless or mandatory. there really is no in between, either way, this still can’t happen until they change the base mechanic of it treating all minions as the same value, but i imagine that once this impacts a leaderboard in a way that actually matters (i.e. right before release) it’ll either be fixed for real at the cost of resources, or just nerfed to be a gimmick spell for those who are just really into the fantasy.
Before I address the following, I’d like to ask the following question:
"Abomination does not decay until you have 6+ Skeletons / Skeleton Mages. If the number of Skeletons drops to below 6 Skeletons, the Abomination’s Decay does not stop.
Who in the everloving realm of ideas thought this was a good idea to implement? Why, oh why, couldn’t it be that if the player goes from above 6 Skeletons to below 6, the Abomination stops decaying? If Skeletons are dying, that means there’s a lot of damage out there that’s killing them, and that’s the absolute worst time to have to worry about another minion dying on top of all that.
I thought the 6 Skeletons idea was alright as long as you can stop the decay process to heal the Abomination up (with leech, probably), but this was precisely the worst way to manage it. Please, if absolutely nothing else gets done about the Abomination, make it so that going below 6 Skeletons stops the decay process so that you have a way to actually stop the Abomination from killing itself if you want to go the “Abomination only eats Skeletons” route.
Zarono I respect your attempts but I would just give up at this point. on all of this.
EHG want their Necromancer different to others games traditional summoners to the point they are just bad to play, ie Dread Shade. Even PoE has some awful sustainable minions to play but reward you with something else - Dancing Dervish for example. Permanent Cyclone/Warpath Swords who cannot die who will aggressively attack everything but desummon if they dont hit something after 10 seconds and need hits to stay alive…thats true Risk v Reward as a summoner since they can de-spawn mid boss battle if you arent careful
Basically if you want to provide feedback, DO NOT post here. just message the devs if you really care as theres no point arguing with forum warriors who dont play Necro.
Also the other factor is NOBODY has posted a 300+ corruption Necro build…because as far as I can see it doesnt exist as it wont work there, which is an even bigger issue imo
Also just give up on Necro and play Manifest Armor Forge Guard who is actually much less hassle to deal with
do you think i have their personal phone numbers or something? this forum is how i message the devs, if i could make a private post that was garanteed to get dev feedback then i would, but that’s not how the system is structured.
In a way, I’m trying to make up for this with my big lengthy posts, since they clearly aren’t getting any actual server data on this class, so identifying the problems is part of the challenge towards balance.
i have a forge guard, he’s a higher level than my necromancer because he’s actually playable, i don’t post about him because he doesn’t really have any problems due to his minions actually benefiting from his personal power stats, and thus he isn’t squishy, and he actually deals his own damage. in other words, he’s already the perfect summoner, so why would i bother making posts about him?
(for reference i also have a high level beastmaster, i play anything with a pet focus, their issues are more build staleness and itemization, since their pets don’t gain from personal power stats, and thus they have to become squishy and worthless to make their pets do anything, just like the necromancer)
While I agree that arguing on the forums isn’t productive, this is the perfect place to provide feedback.
We have read the suggestions on this thread and have taken it into consideration. We do not plan on removing the abomination at this time. We appreciate that it is not a perfect skill and are open to suggestions to improve it.
Well now I have a second post to make when I get home, but if you could do me a favor, to keep the conversation as productive as possible, could you explain what exactly your goal with the abomination skill is? Because if you’re aiming for something balanced, I’ve already detailed a rational argument on why this isn’t possible in its current structure, and if you just want a fun gimmick spell, I can give insight in that direction too, but without knowing what it is you want, I can only run in circles around the idea of the abomination.
Like I’ve said before. I think the idea behind building the abo around consuming other creatures, was a very cool idea. But it just doesn’t work. I stand by my previous suggestion, that abo should be permanent - and the passive tree being focused on “putting the pieces together to make it”, making the abo skill tree sort of a laboratory.
As an example, for its hands… you have 3 mutually exclusive options. Something like poison claws OR frenzy claws OR Brute fists. Then do this for all its body parts, so that through the passive skill tree - your choices basically assembles your custom made abomination.
This way the abo would be a flexible perma pet that can fill the role you need it to. Whether tank, auras, healing, dps, mitigation etc. The core damage values, size and HP adjusted down in trade for it being permanent. And the upgrades making it strong in the areas you want it to.
Edit: This is merely a suggestion for the purpose of example.
Body.
Big, lots of HP and taunt. But makes its run and attack speed slower.
Medium sized, a weaker taunt and higher resistances, but lower life. Attack speed normalized.
Slim. No taunt, lower health, but higher overall damage and attack speed.
Head.
Cerberus upgrade gives it 3 heads which each spew fire bolts that taunts on hit and deal high damage, but the ability has a long cooldown.
Rotten head giving it poison damage to attack, poison damage aura, and poison resist.
Horned head. Much lower crit chance, but much higher crit damage.
Claws.
Poison claws that deal AOE damage in melee and apply poison.
Physical claws that grants it frenzy on hit and bleed damage.
Void claws that gives it regeneration on hit, and lowers enemy void resistance.
+Feet, +Tail.
You get the idea. Anyway, not sure how feasible this would be to implement. It’s just a suggestion. Like I said I actually loved the idea behind it eating your own minions to assemble into a combo of the minions sacrificed.
However the problems with it not being permanent already makes it - NOT FUN AT ALL. So if you combine an already not fun factor (not perma) with it having to eat your other minions EVERY TIME it dies? It’s basically the most anti-fun skill ever in practice. Which is such a shame, because the model is friggin awesome.
I actually agree with Zarono on the Abomination issue.
I would prefer the Abomination just be summoned without needing to consume corpses.
I also think the Abomination should not decay. Instead it should just not be able to heal through most methods.
To keep the theme though, it would be interesting to have the abomination not be able to leech or regen or heal through spells, but instead only gets health back from every enemy/minion killed around it. It would represent the Abomination absorbing the corpse to rebuild its bits lost in combat.
To take that a bit further, the Abomination could even get a bit of the abilities of the absorbed corpses. If a rare with fire resist gets killed around the Abomination, then it would gain a bit of fire resist. Obviously this shouldn’t scale infinitely, but maybe the buffs could lose effectiveness over time and eventually just fall off. This would make your other minion choices matter a bit though, as them dying around the Abomination would bestow a bit of their abilities to the Abomination.
I believe that Abomination should start out only picking up skelly warriors and archers. But have LOTS of nodes that reference other minion types to sacrifice(or maybe even one that disables sacrificing skellies)
Also the sacrificed minion should change the abom significantly and the sacrifice effect should be something you do AFTER summoning the abom(so it can exist outside of minion sacrifice builds, but as a significantly weaker creature)
The point being that a skeleton rogue should give a poison skill if sacrificed, archers cause it to periodically fire arrows(where the number of attacks is based on sacrificed archers), warriors cause its autoattacks to deal extra hits and so on.
Further, as any creature outside of the warriors and archers would need the specific nodes on the skill bar, you do not get the issue of hitting the wrong minion with abom sacrifice AND you have to decide which of the different sacrifice options to specialise in
Also it may be a good idea to have these bonuses be effected by the minions skill tree to a small degree, for damage conversion nodes. This change in particular would turn abom from a paricitic skill to a synergistic one.
this could also be a thing on top of what I have said - as in if a archer dies near it, abom uses it to fire projectiles, if volitile zombie dies near it, then it gets a repeating exploding aoe. EDIT:Perhaps the sacrifice only is a thing as in a way to trigger the temporary buff more easily without having to rely on something killing the minion for you. Also it gives back more health to the abom.
I agree, but does this mean to say that it would be like the first option I suggested (in this post: Rethinking the Abomination) , and the abomination consumes on summoning, or did you have a secondary mechanism in mind for how the abomination consumes things, so that it can consume on demand long after it had been summoned?
